(Page 2 of 9) - MERCOSUR and EU: Comparative Political Issues authored by Guedes de Oliveira, Marcos.

A counter-force to emerging integration ideas was a new wave of nationalism, particularly
in Germany and Italy, states of late consolidation. Their leaders’ actions together with the
fear and aspirations of small national groups spread suspicion and produced an arms race in
Europe, pre-conditions for break out of the First and the Second World Wars. By the end
of the Second War there were two dominant ideas: one on the declining of European states
and a second that a federal Europe was a next and needed step for the survival of the
continent. The terrible consequences of the two world wars have ended the European
condition as center of power, science, culture and civilization. It had become a frontier area
of disputes between two superpowers, had lost its scientific and cultural hegemony and was
put under the constant menace of nuclear destruction. What could have been worse? In this
unforeseen context, Europeans with the support of the United States begun to take seriously
the road towards integration.

South and Central Americas were not involved in a global war and they were not bound to
be in the center of a bipolar Cold War. Latin America was never so well protected under
U.S. umbrella than in the aftermath of WWII. Regional integration has become for
European nations a matter of life or death; for Latin America it was seen as a facilitator to
overcome backwardness.

The Latin America project looks back to colonial exploitation, to the backward heritage of
European domination and indicates a way to overcome this past and to foster economic and
social development. Differently, the European project is associated to the historic crisis of
their powerful states, to the undeniable need to stop waves of European destructive wars
that created global crisis and fostered U.S. projection towards world hegemony, to the
desire to rebuild Europe as the center of civilization, power and hope.

The European states can look at themselves as decaying political structures in need of a
common economic framework while the Latin Americans look at themselves as building up
economic structures based on industry, urban life and thus creating and enhancing newly-
independent states. Europe was at the center of U.S. attention and worry about its future
position as hegemonic power, not Latin America.

This perception is the key to understand the slow development of integration in the south.
The decades following the end of the war were marked by a wish for a father-like U.S.
support followed by frustration with U.S. denial to recognize the region as strategic in face
of its growing involvement on conflicts in Asia and Europe. Gradually as a result of this
dilemma Brazil, as well as Argentina, started moving in the direction of creating national
development strategies that would depend less on the U.S. will and more on state-oriented
guidelines.

The United Nations became in the 1950s instrumental for Latin America cries for economic
support. The creation of United Nation’ s CECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean) represented its most important step. By the end of the 1950s
development was at last gaining momentum in regional politics. Industrialization had
firmly started in Brazil and President Kennedy – after the Cuban revolution – admitted the
need for a response to regional cries. Thus, the Alliance for Progress was created.